


yolk

by yoonbot (iverins)



Category: Gugudan (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-14
Updated: 2017-09-14
Packaged: 2018-12-26 12:25:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12058959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iverins/pseuds/yoonbot
Summary: In which Sejeong fights fate. She likes to think she wins.





	yolk

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nekrateholic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nekrateholic/gifts).
  * Inspired by [heartburn](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11792235) by [neverwhere (nekrateholic)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nekrateholic/pseuds/neverwhere). 



> dear recipient,
> 
> i had such a fun time combing through your fics to find one to remix! you have a lot of hidden gems, especially heartburn ♡ i was torn between remixing this fic and your vernon/the8 ficlets, but ultimately chose this one! i hope you enjoy this despite the rushed ending and i also hope your original fic receives much love too!!
> 
>  
> 
> to the mods: thank you for putting up with my tardiness (╥_╥) and for organizing another year of ficmix!

Sejeong was born in late August, right when the heat of summer's been going on so long that it becomes almost unbearable. The thought of getting a year older comes to her absentmindedly, usually in the midst of the first few weeks back in class, sweating into her chair, looking out the window at the sun mercilessly beating down across the backs of the grass field, more dirt than green, the sky a floury blue next to the yolk.

Sometimes she wonders what it would be like to born in the fall, when the air takes on a sort of calm and the streets smell like the leaves crunching beneath the bottoms of her shoes, soles flopping apart from the tops. Or winter when the snow wets her socks through the hole where her big toe pokes through, or spring when the rain and wind pelt against her umbrella. It might be nice, she thinks, laying on her futon as the ceiling fan spins as aimlessly as she feels, just-washed hair sticking to her neck in a mix of sweat and shower water, and her twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, twentieth, twenty-fifth birthday pass between the spokes. It might be nice to not be born in the summer.

But her mother has always said to appreciate everything you were given. So Sejeong tries, tiptoeing to peek over the railing of the bridge on her way home from school when she's ten, trying her first and last cigarette with Nayoung on that same bridge in the haze of a warm, polluted midnight when she's fifteen, walking her bike down the stairs after her last day of exams when she's twenty on those fateful August twenty-eighths.

She really does.

 

 

 

 

People are not born alone, Sejeong learns when she's young. It's sometime in between her hopping up to sit down at the dinner table, her mother always scolding her to not kick her dangling legs during meals because she'd catch her brother in the shins, and growing up playing games with her brother's friends, before her brother started wincing in pain every now and then, her mother rubbing his back the days it was worse with a reassuring _it'll pass, it'll pass._

Sejeong has felt her soulmate's pain for as long as she can remember, enough to know someone must be out there for her. Her mother and brother bring up the fact that she cried all the time when she was a baby over random things. Maybe it was from your soulmate's pain, her mother would end the conversation suggesting, a tired smile tugging at her lips.

Sejeong knows what their neighbors say about her mother. She punched a kid in the nose until his nose bled over it and only begrudgingly apologized with her words but not her heart when her mother looked at her with those tired, but disappointed, eyes. A single mother, two kids, the husband left – was he even her soulmate? That's where it all goes wrong, you know. Trying to go against your fate.

Maybe, Sejeong would say, snuggling into her mother's arms. They don't see the way her brother takes on as many part-time jobs as he can as soon as he's old enough, the way her mother falls asleep at the dinner table at eleven with the hum of the kitchen's light above her, the strange looks Sejeong used to get in primary school when she'd eat the lunch she'd pack herself, too guilty to ask her mother to make her food.

People aren't born alone, but they don't always end up together. Sejeong grows up thinking there's a certain strength behind the way her family lives. There's a certain pride to feel when you defy fate and live to tell the tale, after all.

 

 

 

 

Statistically speaking, twenty-six point eight percent of South Koreans meet their soulmate before the age of twenty. Narrow down that study to just those who live in Seoul and it spikes up another thirteen percent, thanks to the population density of the city.

Sejeong meets Nayoung when she's fourteen and in her first year of middle school. Nayoung's a year older than her, but she takes to Sejeong after she accidentally hits her in the head with a volleyball even when they're in different P.E. classes and on entirely different sides of the blacktop.

"My friends were all older than me," Nayoung says on their way back from school later that day, the early dusk of late February turning the sky beyond the trees a hue of lavender. The handlebars of Sejeong's bike wobble in her grasp – she insisted on helping Sejeong walk her bike back ("It's not safe for you to ride it when you just got hit in the head!" she'd claimed. "It wasn't that hard," Sejeong countered.) and Nayoung steered them to a nearby park that Sejeong always rode past without a second glance – the wheels barely avoiding Nayoung's clean white sneakers. Sejeong looks down at her own greying ones inconspicuously, the same ones from last year, gone through the wash one too many times. "They all graduated and went on to high school without me."

It’s not entirely true – there’s Sojin, who’s Sejeong’s age and in the classroom down the hall, and Haebin, who’s Sojin’s soulmate, and they both yelp when Nayoung slaps one of them in the shoulder – and Sejeong suddenly finds herself running to hide under awnings when the rain surprises them in mid-March, giggling over pranking Nayoung by hiding her shoes after P.E, and riding her bike alongside Sojin’s rollerblading on their way to school. It’s not like Sejeong didn’t have friends back in primary school, but once they’d change classes for the new year, things changed and Sejeong would find different people to play tag with in the hallways. She never had a Nayoung – who had an easy way of speaking with her heavy voice – or a Sojin, who helped Sejeong with her math homework in the library, or a Haebin, who would join in on her good-natured teasing of Nayoung with incidents that happened in class.

That’s why Sejeong feels her heart sinking into her toes the day Nayoung and Haebin graduate and go on to high school. Sojin’s tearing up despite her claims that she isn’t, and Sejeong just laughs, hoping the sound is light enough to float up through the fractals of sky that shine through the dense layer of tree leaves in the park on their way home.

“Eyy,” Haebin says, slinging an arm over Sojin, who has a few centimeters over her due to a growth spurt over the fall. “Don’t be sad! Our school isn’t far from here, anyway.”

“We’ll see each other all the time,” Nayoung chimes in, pinching Sojin’s and Sejeong’s cheeks. Sejeong squirms around in her grasp.

Sojin wipes at her eyes with the back of her uniform sleeve. It’s February again, the remnants of the cold still nipping at their noses, and Sejeong thinks about cooking soup for dinner. “Promise?” she sniffles out, and Nayoung just grabs her and plants a lip-glossed kiss on her cheek. Haebin yells after her after Nayoung laughs and thunders away.

“It’s not gonna be the same,” Sojin whispers as they watch Nayoung getting cornered by Haebin by the jungle gym. Sejeong glances over at her and reaches for her hand instead. It makes her bike wobble from where she’s walking it and Sojin’s rollerblades keep bumping into her elbow, but Sejeong thinks their silence is comfortable.

Sojin’s right – it really isn’t. With high school comes _hagwons_ and the pressure to buckle down and study for entrance exams, and they see Nayoung and Haebin at most twice a week. Sejeong doesn’t hold it against them when Nayoung or Haebin ends up replying _can’t, sorry, have school work ):_ to her and Sojin’s suggested plans, but Sejeong feels a hollow pang in her gut over it, even after she’s eaten until she’s full.

She and Nayoung message more than she does with Haebin – usually dumb, pointless things like sharing viral videos and trying to procrastinate from studying by sending _i don’t feel like reading_ texts – so that’s why Sejeong gets a call from her late one night, when Sejeong’s dozing off at the dinner table over her literature homework, waiting for her mother to come home, and Nayoung’s screaming into the receiver.

“I met him, Sejeong!” Nayoung says, from where Sejeong’s holding the phone a little away from her ear.

Sejeong rubs her eyes and yawns loud enough so that Nayoung can hear it over the line. “Who?” she echoes, confused.

Nayoung huffs. “My soulmate, you dummy.” Sejeong’s mind, still half-asleep, pauses for a moment while Nayoung keeps talking. “He’s in the class next to mine and he’s the most annoying –”

Sejeong thinks she listens, but she doesn’t remember a lot of the details. She’s happy for Nayoung – and of course she’s happy for Nayoung, Nayoung’s her best friend with parents that treat Sejeong like their daughter, too, Nayoung who always promised _if we don’t find our soulmates, we should just get married or something_ – but her thoughts go fuzzy and distant in her happiness.

What Sejeong does remembers is that she’s sixteen when she thinks she first feels alone in this world.

 

 

 

 

Sejeong is also sixteen when she first falls in love.

His name is Hakyeon and he’s much older than her – almost out of university while Sejeong’s not even in high school yet. He’s tan with smooth, black hair, expressive eyes, and lips that tend to turn up whenever he starts to speak. He’s one of Sanghyuk’s friends, Sanghyuk being Nayoung’s soulmate and they hold hands the entire way to the cafe to which Sejeong, who Nayoung dragged along for “moral support,” keeps calling foul for.

“You sound like a bitter old man waving a cane,” Sanghyuk frowns. Sejeong gave him the shovel talk a couple weeks ago, when they’d first been introduced, and Sanghyuk seems to still be reeling from it, according to a giggling Nayoung. Sejeong sticks her tongue out at him and Sanghyuk just sighs in response.

“You two need to grow up,” Nayoung says, rolling her eyes, right as Sanghyuk opens the door for them. That’s when she sees Hakyeon, and Sejeong forgets what she was going to say in reply.

It’s weird because it doesn’t feel like anything like the way Sejeong thought love would go. The axis of the world doesn’t tilt and realign itself with Hakyeon at its center, and Sejeong doesn’t suddenly grow tunnel vision, and there’s no halo beaming around his hair. Instead, Sejeong feels her eyes wandering back to him every now and then, like there’s some gravitational force in her eyeballs drawing her gaze towards him. And yes, he’s handsome, but his neck is also rather long and he laughs a little too loud when Sanghyuk gives one of his snarky, but largely unfunny, remarks. He’s not really anything like those boys that Sojin reads about in her manhwas, but there’s just _something_ about him, and Sejeong can’t help but stare.

Their conversation is easy in the beginning. Hakyeon explains how Sanghyuk’s basically like a little brother to him and their other friend, Jaehwan, and he looks so endeared when Sanghyuk tells the story of how he and Nayoung met (“I bought the last banana milk in the vending machine, and she kicked me for it.” Sejeong thinks it’s a rather unremarkable story as far as finding your soulmate goes, but oh well.). He hasn’t met his own soulmate yet – a fact that Sejeong tries hard not to hang onto – and he’s almost done with his bachelor’s in performing arts.

It’s all easy until Nayoung starts talking about herself. “I like to think I’m okay at sports,” Nayoung says, to which Sanghyuk chokes on his coffee and Sejeong throws her head back and laughs.

“We met because you hit my head with a volleyball,” Sejeong points out. Nayoung frowns and slaps her in the arm.

“Why did I let you come along?” Nayoung mutters, but Sanghyuk and Jaehwan are laughing too, and then Sejeong’s eyes wander back to Hakyeon. He’s staring straight back at her, his lips frozen in between a smile and neutrality, and he lowers his gaze when he notices that their eyes are trained on each other.

A couple minutes later, Sejeong feels a sharp pain coming from her thigh. She yelps right when Sanghyuk starts talking, and they all stare at her. “I’m fine,” she says, waving a dismissive hand. It’d been a few weeks since she felt pain other than her own – the sign that someone was actually still out there for her. “I think someone just pinched my soulmate really hard.”

“Maybe they’re getting some,” Sanghyuk says, being the gross boy that he is, and Nayoung slaps him too. Sejeong wonders if Nayoung feels the same pain from that in her own shoulder through her blush. Hakyeon looks like he’s going pale and Jaehwan looks confused.

“So how old did you two say you are?” Hakyeon says once the fuss has died down.

Nayoung finally tears herself away from where she’s probably stepping on Sanghyuk’s foot under the table. “Oh,” she starts, gathering her hair and putting it over her other shoulder, and the ends tickle Sejeong’s arms. “I’m Sanghyuk’s age and Sejeong is sixteen.” When she puts it like that, Sejeong feels impossibly young and small at the table.

Hakyeon looks like he’s trying his best not to spit out something really sour. “Nice,” he says, almost forcing it out, and Sejeong wonders what happened to the Hakyeon of just thirty minutes ago. He excuses himself for a bit and comes back looking even worse than before.

“Do you think he’s the brooding type?” Sejeong asks Nayoung over the phone later, the ceiling fan doing nothing to stop the sweat from trickling, sticky, down her neck. It’ll be August soon, she thinks, and then she’d be a year older. Closer to twenty-two.

“Dunno,” Nayoung says. “Hakyeon?” There’s a rustling where Nayoung moves the phone, probably shifting positions on her bed. “Sanghyuk doesn’t describe him like a serious person.”

Sejeong holds her breath. “Then what does he describe him as?”

Nayoung screams. Sejeong drops her phone in shock, and it lands on her sheets. “Do you like Cha Hakyeon, Kim Sejeong?” she yells into the phone.

Sejeong laughs, and she feels giddy, like she could float up and out of the shaky window of her and her brother’s shared room and reach the moon and all the while not be afraid of the dark. “Don’t tell anyone,” she says, mock-serious, but even she hears the giggle in her voice. Nayoung just keeps squealing.

 

 

 

 

Weeks go by. Months. Sejeong starts high school in a public school twenty minutes away from Nayoung and Haebin’s private academy and they meet up sometimes at convenience stores with Sojin, who’s miraculously in Sejeong’s class, and Sejeong cops snacks from Nayoung’s bag when she’s turned to Sanghyuk, bickering with him over something. Hakyeon’s face becomes flimsy in Sejeong’s memory until all she remembers is the sour downturn of his lips near the end of their encounter, a microcosm of the man.

Sejeong’s brother leaves for university in Daegu that January. It’s not a prestigious school, but it’s alright, and seeing how her brother relied on self-studying for the entrance exam in between his part-time jobs, Sejeong and her mother are happy for him. After he hugs their mother, he pats Sejeong on the head, messing up her hair.

“Take care of mom,” he says with a crooked smile while Sejeong tries to fix her bangs. She curls her lip and nudges him in the side in response. It’s the first time she hears him laugh in a while, and it looks like a weight’s been lifted off his shoulders as he packs the last box into their uncle’s old Sonata and waves before driving away.

They’ve been living better for a few years now – Sejeong’s mother got a promotion sometime when Sejeong had been in middle school, and while her mother had been working longer hours, she got Sundays off now, and Sejeong’s brother only had to take out a loan for half of his tuition after his scholarship. It’s not enough that Sejeong can afford to stop tutoring the kids of the family that live a couple floors below them or not think about finding a part-time job elsewhere, but it’s a lot more than when Sejeong was in sixth grade and hungry by second period because the rice porridge she’d always eat for breakfast wasn’t enough.

Sejeong knows she should be grateful, and she is, or at least she really tries to be. It’s just that sometimes, sometimes when she looks into the hallway during lunch while Sojin’s napping over her English textbook, there’ll be a couple holding hands as they pass by. Sometimes Nayoung and Sanghyuk pause in between their constant arguing and look at each other with such a softness that Sejeong thinks she’s intruding, and sometimes Sojin’s fingers slip from between her own as she runs off towards Haebin.

It’s dumb but sometimes Sejeong wonders if Hakyeon’s her soulmate, and if he ever thinks of her. Sometimes she gets splitting headaches in the morning and wonders if they’re his, scrapes on her knees and wonders if his sting too from the rubbing alcohol she’ll pour to disinfect them. She writes down what she remembers of him like a lovesick girl and feels ridiculous about it the entire time, only taking out that notebook from behind her old workbooks when there’s that pressing hollowness in her gut, gnawing at her from the inside.

Other times, Sejeong forgets that there’s pain other than hers out there in the world. Her brother’s never found his soulmate, and her mother only shakes her head when Sejeong asks about hers. You’re okay, she tells herself when she’s accidentally locked herself out of the apartment one evening, sitting with her arms wrapped around her legs for hours until her mother comes home to let her in. You’re okay, when Nayoung talks about going to the same university as Sanghyuk, when Sejeong’s walking home alone at night after her job at the nearby bookstore, when her period comes every month and the cramps with it.

You’re Kim Sejeong, she thinks during those nights when she stays awake wondering if her soulmate lives thousands of miles and oceans away from her, never to meet. You’re Kim Sejeong, and you’re strong enough to beat your older brother at arm wrestling.

A fire burns within her, and it’s bright enough to cut through any darkness. You’re Kim Sejeong, and you’re fearless.

 

 

 

 

Sejeong’s glad to go to university in Incheon. It’s a short enough train ride that she can go home and see her mother whenever she needs to, but far enough to escape the park Nayoung walked her through so many times before, crying like the big baby she was before she left for university herself, the convenience store that she and Sojin would stop at before she saw Sojin off to her _hagwon_ that Sejeong could never afford, the library that Sejeong would sit at for hours poring over practice exams as the air conditioning blasted, saving her from the stuffiness of her own room, too big without her brother’s things in them. The cafe that she met Hakyeon in all those years before, when she was young and easily lovestruck.

She’s twenty and wants to be new somewhere for once, after years surrounded by the same people and places. She doesn’t look back as the train pulls away from the station and the first thing she does after she moves her things into the apartment she’ll share with five other girls is find a hair salon and cut her hair to her shoulders after years of growing it out.

After the twenty-six point eight percent is the eighteen point two percent that meet their soulmates in their twenties. Strangely enough, one of the professors that participated in writing that article teaches at Sejeong’s university. She passes by her office one day when she’s looking around campus for her classes and pauses in front of the door. Sejeong flinches away when she hears other footsteps down the hall.

People at university are much different from Sejeong’s high school classmates. The girls wear a lot more makeup now that they can, people date without regards to soulmates or fate, and everyone walks around connected to their earphones. One of Sejeong’s housemates doesn’t even acknowledge her when she says hi – just takes off her shoes and places them in the shoe rack, brushing past Sejeong to get to her single room – her earbuds playing music so loud that even Sejeong can tell it’s the latest EXO release in her ears the entire time she’s in the common areas.

Sejeong becomes fast friends with her other housemates, especially Mimi, who she shares a room with. Mimi’s a little sloppy and bad with house chores, but she’s a third year and she takes Sejeong out to do things she’d never do back at home, like party.

“You have a hangover,” Nayoung states, fully unimpressed when Sejeong shows up late to their pre-arranged outing the morning after Mimi takes her drinking.

Sejeong turns up her nose, ignoring the way her head spins from it. “No, I don’t,” she insists, stubborn. Nayoung rolls her eyes and pokes at her arm.

“I know one when I see one,” she frowns. She orders _samgyetang_ for Sejeong anyway and doesn’t let her pay for it. Sejeong never drinks as much as she did that first night ever again.

Classes are interesting enough, though the tedium of studying and homework remain relatively the same. Sejeong decided to major in education, and she’s never felt so eager listening to some of her professor’s lecture in comparison to when her high school teachers would drone on about algebra. She meets some other friends in her major – Bora, who’s in Mimi’s year and coincidentally, also Mimi’s friend, and Chungha, a first year like her, but debating on whether to switch to dance.

Both of them and Mimi haven’t met their soulmates yet, either. “My mom says I’m going to become an old maid,” Bora frowns one day when she’s over at Sejeong and Mimi’s. Chungha nudges her with her foot from where she’s lying beside her on the floor.

“Don’t say things like that, unnie,” Chungha says. “I bet you could hook up with that guy that keeps staring at your legs in class!”

Bora sits up so quickly that she cracks something. Sejeong laughs. “Your body is already on its way to being old,” she comments and Bora glares at her. Mimi smiles from where Sejeong suspects she’s been dozing off for at least thirty minutes now at the joke.

“Are you talking about Lee Hongbin?” Bora asks, scrunching up her nose in distaste. “I heard Soyeon just broke up with him.”

She and Hongbin end up making out at the next party Sejeong goes to, and Chungha yells _I told you so!_ so loudly into Sejeong’s ear that it rings for the rest of the night.

“What about you, Sejeong?” Chungha says, turning to her. Bora looks relieved to finally not be the target. “Are you looking to date anyone?”

Sejeong doesn’t for her entire first year. “I’m married to my studies,” she tells anyone who asks with a laugh. And it’s true – she doesn’t need someone in her life, really. She’s only – the summer passes by and the heat crawls up her arms, and another birthday passes with her sweating beneath the ceiling fan at home – twenty-one, and there’s still years before the chances of meeting your soulmate become that slim.

Second year comes and Chungha meets her soulmate when she visits Sejeong at work – one of Sejeong’s coworkers named Im Nayoung – and Sejeong meets Kang Daniel.

He’s her age and also in the education department, but a first year. Unlike his foreign-sounding name suggests, he’d completed his military service right out of high school after deferring enrollment in university.

“Kim Sejeong,” he says, holding a beer out to her at some party she let Mimi drag her to. She takes it from his hand warily, lifting an eyebrow before taking a swig. “I’ve heard things about you.”

Sejeong cracks a smile at that. “That’s funny,” she shakes her head. His eyes are so, so dark, but instead of scary like the night without a nightlight Sejeong feared when she was young, they remind her of how Sojin’s dog used to look at her when she discreetly slipped it leftovers under the table. The smile on his lips settles there when he opens his mouth to say something, but she talks over it, disrupting that chain of thought before it ends at _Hakyeon,_ surname forgotten, that notebook still hidden behind her old workbooks at home, unforgotten. “I’ve heard things about you, too.”

Daniel laughs at that and Sejeong can tell why the gaggle of first year girls whisper about him in the cafeteria near the education building. “Well,” he says, eyes sparkling. He shuffles to find a comfortable stance like they’ll be here all night, and instead of taking a step closer to her like she half-expects, half-hopes for, he leans back against the wall. “What have you heard?”

Sejeong takes another sip of the beer. The bubbles rise up from her stomach and there’s a giddiness creeping up with it, like she could float up and out of the shaky window of her and her brother’s old shared room, replaced last winter when she went home for break, and reach the moon. All the while, Sejeong wouldn’t be afraid of the dark, or be reminded that there was a boy before this, a boy whose face she can’t really remember other than those lips that curved into a sour grimace.

A microcosm of a man.

 

 

 

 

Chungha tells her that being with Nayoung feels like living in a tiny house. A little uncomfortable – years have been lost when they could’ve known each other, and Nayoung is as straight edge as they come – and a little stifling when the windows are open, but it’s home.

Nayoung – Sejeong’s Nayoung with the prominent cheekbones and clumsy tendencies and Sanghyuk – told her that being with Sanghyuk just felt _right._ Sejeong had been in her second year of high school then, Nayoung in her third, and it was weird to hear your longtime friend talk about something so seriously.

Sejeong’s heard other stories about soulmates that don’t get along, soulmates that never end up crossing paths for their whole lives, soulmates that pass away before they ever meet. Everything’s possible when the world is so full of people, and Sejeong’s brother still hasn’t met his own soulmate, but Sejeong’s always assumed she’d meet her own at some point in her life, whether she wanted to or not.

“I’m never going to meet my soulmate,” Daniel tells her when they’re taking a midnight stroll around the residential area near her apartment. His hands are large and warm but have a tendency to sweat, so Sejeong has to remove hers every once in a while to wipe them on her pants. Good thing it’s winter now, and the snow is still falling, so their fingers are separated by his gloves, her mittens.

Sejeong frowns. “Why do you say that?”

Daniel sighs, a cloud of breath framing his mouth that he's pressed against Sejeong’s many times before. They weren’t soulmates they’d learned early on in their relationship – the day when Sejeong’s period came, the cramps unbearable, Daniel was completely fine – but they were both okay with it. _In case the what-ifs never happen,_ Sejeong always joked, but occasionally she’d wonder if she was no better than her six-year-old self who believed in the fairy tales her mother read to her sometimes.

“They’re dead,” Daniel says. “Whoever they were.”

It’d happened, he told her, when he was in high school. One day he was playing basketball with friends after school, and the next thing he knew was blinking his eyes open to sterile white walls. “I don’t know what it was,” he insists when Sejeong tries to suggest otherwise. “But if you could feel death, I think that was it.”

Sejeong’s wondered before that maybe her soulmate’s no longer out there for her. But rather than fade into nothingness, she’ll wake up to an ache in her body every few months, too deep-settled to be of her own doing. She reaches for Daniel, untangling her hand from his to reach up and cup his face, something to anchor them to this world without the other halves that fate left out there for them to find, a half he lost, a half she might never meet.

“I love you,” she says just to say it. Sejeong doesn’t know if she means it. Maybe Daniel doesn’t believe it, either. It reminds her a lot of the time she first kissed someone – a boy in the class next to hers that everyone said had a crush on her for years – and how she was the one who stepped onto her tiptoes and pressed her lips to his, chaste, before walking away. Sejeong knows she’s good at taking, and she feels guilty for taking these words from them, words that she could mean in maybe a few weeks, months, years. But what she knows right now, in this moment, is that they both need to hear it.

Daniel doesn’t move away. “Okay,” he breathes. He shakes the snow from his hair and lifts her hands gently away from his cheeks and puts them in his pockets.

That night, Sejeong realizes what the pain her soulmate has been giving her every few months is. And to Daniel’s snores, she wonders if they’re out there feeling like this, too – more lost at the realization than found.

 

 

 

 

Nayoung gets engaged to Sanghyuk the year Sejeong graduates from university and moves back home. The park that they used to stop by on their way home from school is still there, along with the bridge she and Nayoung smoked their only cigarettes at, and the _hagwon_ Sojin used to attend and is now working at.

“Our Naong is all grown up,” Sejeong teases, wiping a fake tear from her eyes. She runs from Nayoung’s affronted _hey!_ and they collapse on the slide of the jungle gym like they’re ten years younger than they actually are, laughing about it.

“I’m happy for you,” she says when Nayoung reaches for her hand. Nayoung looks at her, full of concern, even when Sejeong squeezes her fingers reassuringly.

“But are you happy?” she asks Sejeong. A group of primary schoolers playing tag rush by, giggling.

Sejeong smiles. “Hey,” she says, pinching Nayoung’s nose. “Don’t worry about me.”

It’s weird not seeing Daniel all the time anymore. Sejeong starts attending classes to get a teaching degree, and Sojin gets her a job at the same _hagwon_ she works at for the experience. Sometimes they video call each other while Sejeong’s cutting fruit for her and her mother, talking about school’s going (Daniel) and how life out of university is (Sejeong), but when they hang up, Sejeong realizes she doesn’t remember what days Daniel said his exams were on.

It’s weirder walking by the spaces she used to occupy with Nayoung, Sojin, and Haebin all the time and not have them beside her, laughing at the funny, thoughtless things that would come out of their mouths sometimes. Things haven’t changed much, honestly – Nayoung still can’t ride rollercoasters and Sojin picks out the tomatoes Haebin slips into her dinner – but Sejeong can’t settle back into her old routines like clockwork without a discomfort running through her body and collecting in her feet, staticky from falling asleep.

One day she’s walking to the bus stop after eating with her co-workers and the street’s oddly familiar. Sejeong swears she’s had to have been here before at least once with Sojin when they were in high school, or maybe it was Nayoung, she was always dragging Nayoung places –

Her feet carry her past the restaurant she was just at, across a busy intersection where Sejeong feels like an ant in a swarm. And then a couple stores down from the corner, it had to be here –

The air is muggy, sticking to her throat as she inhales. Sejeong stops, hands in her pockets, and stares at what’s no longer a cafe, but a barbeque place. There was that guy, and his name written in the purple ink of that pen she used to use in high school, all over that notebook she got for her birthday, hidden behind her old workbooks, not even half-used.

 _Hakyeon._ That was his name. And his face – tan skin. Smooth black hair. Lips that smiled when he spoke.

Sejeong stands there until one of the workers, some man who must be around her age – right out of university and desperate for a job in this economy – asks her if she wants to have a seat. Business must be slow, Sejeong thinks as she shakes her head with a smile and walks away.

She wonders if she should ask Sanghyuk about Hakyeon. _A stupid little crush back in the day,_ she could pass it off as.

Sejeong’s passed off a lot of things for less.

 

 

 

 

The next few years fly by. Sejeong gets her teaching degree and a job at a high school across the city from the one she attended and some of the kids are rowdy enough for her to forget everything else. But she loves them, and she’d like to think they love her too, and this is what she wanted.

Nayoung and Sanghyuk’s wedding happens. Nayoung’s the most beautiful bride and Sanghyuk’s alright, or at least Sejeong tells him as much, and laughs about the disgruntled expression that crosses his face at it. Haebin cries and Sejeong almost does, but manages to hold back. She’s reintroduced to Lee Jaehwan – who Sejeong remembers from his prominent nose – as well as his soulmate Taekwoon, who works in the administration of the high school in the nearby district. Hakyeon’s noticeably absent, and she hears Taekwoon make a remark about it under his breath when Nayoung asks why.

“This might be weird but,” Sejeong starts in the midst of Taekwoon describing some of the troublemakers of their school. Jaehwan nods, telling her to go on, but Sejeong lets go of the breath she was holding instead. “Never mind.”

She’s cooing over Nayoung and Sanghyuk’s first born a couple years later. “Can I take him home?” Sejeong jokes when Nayoung’s collapsed on the sofa after he’s sound asleep. “I want kids too!”

Nayoung gets that concerned look on her face again and Sejeong automatically regrets saying it. “It’s fine, it’s fine,” she reassures Nayoung before she can say anything. “I’m fine.”

She and Daniel split up a couple of months before Sejeong’s thirtieth birthday. She’d moved in with him after he graduated from university – they’d both gotten jobs around the same area, and it’d been convenient along with a good change of pace from always having to hear her mother say _kids these days don’t marry until they’re forty, anyway._

He’d broken it to her over home-cooked rice porridge that tasted nothing like how her family liked theirs, his index finger rubbing over her thumb. “I’m going to study abroad,” he’d said, half-nervous, half-full of an excitement Sejeong hadn’t seen in him for years, since he’d started working at the office downtown.

“Oh,” she said. It wasn’t the sound of heartbreak, or any pain of the sort. Instead, it sounded like something lukewarm bubbling up, like the way Sejeong would press her eyes closed if Daniel happened to be snoring by the time she went to bed.

Daniel laughed and went on. “In Australia.”

Sejeong stabbed a carrot with her chopsticks. It fell apart at her prodding, softened from the boiling. She didn’t bother to pick up the pieces. “Australia’s a long way from Seoul,” she tried, cautiously.

“I know,” Daniel replied. His eyes softened and he let go of her hand. “I’m not coming back until I’m done.”

“Do you expect me to – ” Sejeong began, not sure where he was going with that.

“No,” Daniel said. “I don’t expect you to come with me. I know you love your job here and all your friends are here, and your English is rusty.” Sejeong kicked him under the table at that and he just smiled.

“But,” he continued, and his voice became small. “If you still love me by the time I come back, then…”

They both knew it was a long shot. Sejeong hadn’t replied to Daniel’s messages for months now, forgotten under tests to grade and students to help and lessons to plan, and every time she remembered it sitting unread in her inbox, she’d ultimately decide it was too late to be casual.

Sejeong turns thirty and celebrates with her mother and a small cake from the bakery her students keep raving about. Her brother video calls in from Busan, where he works now, and Sejeong spends the night in their old bedroom, sweating into her old futon.

Sejeong has co-workers at her school that are older than her that haven’t met their soulmates yet. Some of them hope they will, other are already married and have children with someone who isn’t.

In birthdays past, Sejeong had wished for pointless things. For a new pair of sneakers before the winter, for her brother to stop leaving his dirty laundry in the bathroom – and then the not-so-pointless things: for her mother to get everything she wanted this year, for good grades on her final exams. For her and her soulmate to finally meet.

This year, Sejeong blows out the candle and makes the wish that this year, she’ll learn to be happier.

 

 

 

 

Hakyeon is still as handsome at forty as he was at twenty-two.

It’s strange how just when you’ve forgotten about someone, they come back rushing into your life. Sejeong isn’t expecting anything from the way Taekwoon tries to get her to accompany some of her students for their show choir performance in the next district, but once Jaehwan starts stuttering when she asks him about the choreographer, she knows something is up. She just didn’t expect it to be Hakyeon.

It doesn’t seem like he remembers her, or he’s very good at pretending to not remember her. He’s got the same tan skin from her memory, and his hair is about the same, just streaked with some stray gray hairs. There’s a few more wrinkles around his eyes when he smiles and some lines showing on his forehead when he gives Jaehwan a serious look before going on with the students. Sejeong thinks she’s wearing her hair about the same way as she did the day they met all those years ago, and Haebin says she doesn’t look like she’s aged since she was twenty-five, so she can’t look that much different from her sixteen-year-old self. Sejeong also thinks she never told either Taekwoon or Jaehwan – who she’d kept in contact with after Nayoung and Sanghyuk’s wedding – about how she liked Hakyeon all those years ago.

Maybe everything was just a freaky coincidence. But then, two days in, Hakyeon almost trips and hisses in pain right when Sejeong feels a pain shooting through her ankle.

 _No._ Sejeong’s mind goes blank. Hakyeon turns and meets her eyes, an unreadable expression in them. It can’t be.

She brings her arm up to pinch herself, still staring straight at him. It fucking hurts and if he’s her soulmate – no, if he has been her soulmate for years – then Hakyeon feels it too.

He winces and it’s undeniable. Sejeong feels her head spin and rather than happiness she just feels...confused.

It’s like she’s sixteen again and sitting across from him, twenty-two and impossibly out of her league, seeing him for the first time. But instead of lovestruck, Sejeong feels angry. Had he known all this time? Did he avoid her all those times – like at the wedding – because he didn’t want her?

There’s a roar in her ears when he walks over to her during a water break. It drowns out what she tells him and what he tells her until all she really remembers is saying, “You’re taking me out and we’re talking.”

Sejeong almost doesn’t see Hakyeon nod before she turns away.

 

 

 

 

Sejeong is thirty-four when she meets her soulmate for the second time.

Hakyeon’s cowardly and an asshole for jumping to conclusions and thinking she was too young to decide what she wanted for herself at sixteen. But he apologizes and Sejeong’s tired of spending all these years wondering _what if_ that she can’t do what he did to her to him, even though some part of her wants to.

Another part of her had always held onto the childish belief that her first encounter with her soulmate would change her life. They’d fall in love at first sight, and eventually have three children and live in a nice apartment with a park nearby a lot like the one near her mother’s.

But as she looks at Hakyeon sitting across from her at a coffee shop a little like the one they met at all those years ago, Sejeong realizes it was never going to be like that. People were too imperfect to have their soulmates be their perfect match, and Daniel and Mimi and Bora were still happy, even without them.

“I don’t hate you,” she says, taking a deep, deep breath. “I don’t hate you. I am really, really mad at you, and I think you’re an asshole, but I don’t hate you.” And it’s the truth.

Hakyeon doesn’t smile. Sejeong doesn’t either. Sejeong doesn’t even know if this will work out – what if Hakyeon just disappoints her again, or what if she gives up on them?

But her mother has always said to appreciate everything you were given. And Sejeong thinks that she and Hakyeon deserve this chance, after all the guilt and anger they’d been through all this time.

And if it works out, well. There's a certain pride to feel when you defy fate and live to tell the tale, after all.


End file.
